Interesting update to this discussion on archives. As we reported this past week: Federal legal professionals appear to be losing confidence in the ability of their agencies to deal effectively with the rising challenges of electronic discovery.

Only 38% of respondents believed that, if challenged by a court or opposing counsel, their agencies could demonstrate that their electronically stored information (ESI) is accurate, accessible, complete, and trustworthy, compared to 68% in 2012. Moreover, the percentage of "not at all confident" responses to this question nearly doubled, from 23% to 42%., according to Deloitte's latest benchmarking study of electronic discovery practices in the government. You can read more at:

One of the ways in which we learn from past wars (and many other things) is by examining their records. If the records of the Gulf War were lost through mere carelessness, then blame rests at the desk of then-Secretary of Defence Cheney (a former White House Chief of Staff), who surely had enough of a sense of history to know better. Ironic that his handling of the war was almost certainly got him the Republican VP nomination in 2000.

Joel5171, thanks for your reply to my question, regarding whether these file analysis tools might breed a false sense of security. You noted didn't have enough space to share more on this. Based on the number of comments and interest here, we'd be happy to have you consider elaborating on these points in another article.

It appears there's a bit of a misunderstanding here: When Joel wrote that the National Archives only deemed between 10 and 15 terabytes of the 54 TB generated by US Central Command to be of a permanent nature, he wasn't referring to a capacity problem but to statutes agencies must follow in preserving certain types documents for the nation's public (and historic) record. (You can fault the way government buys IT these days, but buying storage isn't the problem.)

The great thing about Active Nav was that it allowed us to go through and find those 15 copies or drafts and then asks how many you would like to keep. It also goes further, and can find near like (not exact) documents and you can get a grasp of those.

For someone who has been working with records both in and outside the federal government, I can tell you the issue of document creep is a big problem. In my experience these File Analysis tools really can help attack that problem.

It was perhaps only 6 years or so I used to laugh when companies that told me they could do auto-classification. Now, in combination with other products like an ERMA, I truly feel that they are requirement for agencies/organizations who have a lot of data.

The PII and de-duplification, finding all those 0 byte files and empty folders is just icing on the cake!

As an archivist who formerly worked for a state government, I'm not the slightest bit surprised that 75% of the total number of documents generated in the conflict turned out to be redundant and/or inconsequential. Usually by the time documents reach an archives, they've been picked over by their creators and many duplicates and low-content items have already been discarded; even when that's the case it's quite common for the archivist to further "weed" multiple copies of memos, duplicates of reports filed elsewhere, etc. How much more so when it sounds like this project caused the documents to more or less come straight to NARA without that filtering?

Beyond the cost of storage, there's also the fact that a bloated, duplicate-ridden collection is more difficult to search and use than a streamlined one. What Li Tan said is accurate: "Keep it all" would be akin to an individual carefully filing away every single scrap of paper that ever came into her house, whether it was information-packed correspondence from distant family members or the fifteenth copy of the exact same Little Caesars flier. It's not helpful to researchers, and it's not an effective use of funds. I do believe that great care must be taken in determining which materials are truly redundant, and there needs to be transparency in terms of what's being kept versus what's being discarded, but it's extremely rare for "Keep it all" to be the appropriate response to the intake of a large collection.

Also, can I just say that the idea of software that identifies potential privacy issues in the documents warms my heart? I can't tell you how much time I spent combing through materials we were going to provide to researchers to make sure we wouldn't be revealing social security numbers.

Save everything is just like keeping all the posts you have received from banks, companies and government agencies. These posts are of importance when they first arrived so you would like to keep them in case of future reference needed. But normally what has happened is that, most of these posts will stay in pile without being touched anymore. Furthermore, save everything will leave you a dilemma: you don't know what is really important for you and when you really need something, simly you are not able to find it. So it's quite important to identify really valuable stuff instead of saving everything.

If there is indeed a war on Military records, it would be the government giving the order for records to be distroyed.

The 1st Gulf war is recorded as the most toxic war in "Western military history" due to the vast array of toxic exposures troops were forced to encounter, this consisted in the main of Toxic fallout plumes from the allied boming of enemy chemicle weapons sites, Deplited uranium dust from our very own ordinence, Toxic smoke inhelation from multiple oil well fires.

In addition, troops were ORDERD to take a experimental cocktail of drugs.

It has been widely reported over the last 23 years that 1 in 4 Desert Storm veterans have come down with serious multiple illnesess, many have sadly died.

All this talk about costings and admin problems for the retention and management of battlefield records is a mere deflection from the truth.

The real reason records go missing is two fold, 1. To hide embarissment & negligence exposures 2. To avoid any legal litigation resulting from such action, pure and simple.

> Save everything! History won't forgive you for repeting the same mistakes you described after the first Gulf War.

If you save everything, you're inviting a maintenance cost that will grow over time. In my experience, data that isn't in motion, being maintained and updated, quickly becomes inaccessible. Selectivity might end up being a better use of tax dollars.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.